At a deeper level, our results suggest a fundamental rethinking of the role of block rewards in cryptocurrency design. The prevailing view is that the block reward is a necessary but temporary evil to achieve an initial allocation of coins in the absence of a central authority. The tr...

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This post is (mostly) a theoretical curiosity, but a discussion last week at CITP during our new course on Bitcoin led us to realize that being an optimal Bitcoin miner is in fact NP-hard. NP-hardness is a complexity classification used in computer science to describe many optimizatio...

There has been a lot of noise in the Bitcoin world this week about a new paper by Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer (“ES” for short) of Cornell, which claims that Bitcoin mining is vulnerable to attack. In a companion blog post, Sirer says unequivocally that “bitcoin is broken .” Let me e...

At Princeton I taught a course on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies during the semester that just ended. Joe Bonneau unofficially co-taught it with me. Based on student feedback and what we accomplished in the course, it was extremely successful. Next week I’ll post videos of al...

A common argument advanced by Bitcoin proponents is that unlike banks and credit cards, Bitcoin has low (or even zero) transaction fees. The claim is a complete red herring, and in this post I’ll explain why. Let’s assume for the purposes of argument that Bitcoin transaction fees are,...

The big news in the Bitcoin world is that there are several Bitcoin-mining ASICs (custom chips) already shipping or about to be launched. Avalon in particular has been getting some attention recently. Bitcoin mining moved long ago from CPUs to GPUs , but this takes it one step further...

Josh Kroll, Ian Davey, and I have a new paper, The Economics of Bitcoin Mining, or Bitcoin in the Presence of Adversaries , from the Workshop on Economics of Information Security . Our paper looks at the dynamics of Bitcoin, how resilient it would be in the face of attacks, and how Bi...